Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices

Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices
Sample Answer for Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Included

Assignment Developing Organizational Policies and Practices

Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices 
A Sample Answer For the Assignment: Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices
Title: Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices

Burnout among nurses compromises the quality of health-care services patients receive. The evidence-based practices require that nurses engage with their patients and create a friendly environment to identify their needs and develop better treatment measures. Besides, they have to take an adequate history of the patients and make accurate diagnoses. On the other hand, nurses experiencing burnout will not have the urgency to interact with the patients because they feel undervalued and insignificance. Various factors contribute to the burnout experiences among the nurses. Some of the factors include a poor working environment and relationship with the leaders. Alternatively, the increasing number of patients with chronic illnesses increases the demand for nursing services. Also, patients with terminal illnesses require palliative care which is dependent on the holistic care approach. Such environments cannot be achieved with the high incidence of burnouts among the nurses. Therefore, addressing the health issue will be important progress to improving the quality of life of the nurses and the quality of healthcare services patients receive.  

Two Competing Needs Impacting Your Selected Healthcare Issue/Stressor 

The previous analysis focused on improving the healthcare worker’s work-life in the University Of Florida Shands Hospital. The competing needs that could impact the burnout issues in the hospital include the need to improve leadership and management in the organization, the need to develop a collaborative culture that allows healthcare providers to share ideas widely and improve the patients’ management. Also, there is a need to promote nursing informatics in the institution, which will significantly improve the quality of healthcare services the patients receive. The healthcare system is dynamic and this means that the needs will also change from time to time. However, the ability of the healthcare institution to handle the needs as they arise depends on the leadership practices.  

Furthermore, poor leadership contributes to a poor working environment, which ultimately contributes to high burnout among the nurses. As a result, there is an urgent need to embrace transformational leadership and a culture of collaboration in the institution. The leadership and cultural system will create a sense of belonging and so reduce the turnout rate as well as burnout incidences among the nurses. Furthermore, nursing informatics needs to aim at linking the patients to the healthcare providers and utilizing the available data to improve the quality of healthcare services the patients receive. It may appear futile to increase the number of nurses or even offer counsel when their working environment is unconducive. Integration of an automated data management system will allow the nurses to access the patients’ data and link with other departments easily and so minimize the time taken to attend to a patient.  

Relevant Policy or Practice in Your Organization That May Influence Your Selected Healthcare Issue/Stressor 

The policies for addressing the healthcare issue in the organization include the increased use of an outside agency to supply the nurses, offering of counseling programs, shifting the 12 hours of work to 8 hours in a day, and offering preceptors for each new employee during the training. The policies aim to improve the nursing experiences and making them more productive in the duties. The policy on increasing the nurse supply and reducing the ratio of patients to nurses will prevent overload and so allow the nurses to spend adequate time with their patients (Boamah et al., 2016). Inadequate supply of the nurses results in overload and prolonged working hours because of the ever ballooning number of patients.  

On the other hand, the counseling programs seek to deal with the psychological concerns of the patients. Burnout is characterized by emotional and psychological exhaustion with the victims having low energies to deliver in their areas of responsibilities. Therefore, offering counseling services will help in identifying other factors likely to be contributing to burnout and how to address them. Furthermore, reducing the working hours from 12 to 8 hours means that the nurses will have time to rest and engage in social activities. Also, their levels of fatigue will reduce significantly (Liu et al., 2019). 

Critique The Policy for Ethical Considerations 

The policies and practices support the ethical principles guiding the healthcare practice. The goal of healthcare delivery is to promote healthy living and reduce suffering among patients. On the other hand, it may be impossible to reduce suffering among patients when the healthcare providers are suffering. Therefore, the practices aimed at improving the quality of life for the nurses and giving them the freshness to handle patients’ needs accordingly. Also, the policies support the ethics of justice. On the other hand, some of the policies regarding the promotion of ethics include discrimination in recruitment by external agencies. Furthermore, the counsellors could provide bias information or rather use the nurses’ data against them. The effectiveness of the counselling sessions depends on the transparency and openness between the nurses and their counsellors. There are cases where nurses may outline specific relating to the organization’s management. Lack of confidentiality from the counsellor could lead to exposing the nurses and affecting their working relationships further.  

Policy or Practice Changes Designed To Balance The Competing Needs Of Resources, Workers, And Patients 

The organization should embrace open forums where both the leaders and nurses can share their ideas and opinions on the work

process. The policy will help in balancing the need to address nurse burnout and the leadership approaches in the organization. The forums will promote the transformational relationship between the nurses and the leaders and so facilitate quality healthcare delivery. Recruiting transformation leaders or rather offering training may require additional resources. Similarly, adding the number of nurses in the organization will require more financial input. However, creating open forums and regular meetings will help in devising collaborative methods to address the nurses working conditions and improve leadership experiences. Burnout is not always about inadequate staffing; however, employees’ experiences and interactions with the organization plays an important role.  

According to Asif et al. (2019), transformational leaders seek to understand the experiences of the nurses and work with them to overcome the challenges. The regular interaction between the leaders and the nurses allows frequent communication and sharing of ideas that alleviate the burnout experiences among the nurses (Wu et al., 2020).

Assignment Developing Organizational Policies and Practices
Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Conclusion 

Finally, burnout is a serious concern in healthcare delivery. Proper policies should be developed to improve the working experiences of the nurses and allow them to offer quality healthcare services to the patients. There is a need to increasing the nursing staff, reduce the working hours and offer counselling services; however, the hallmark approach to burnout incidences is improving the leadership practice and working environment which stimulates passion for work among the nurses.  

Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices References 

Asif, M., Jameel, A., Hussain, A., Hwang, J., & Sahito, N. (2019). Linking transformational leadership with nurse-assessed adverse patient outcomes and the quality of care: Assessing the role of job satisfaction and structural empowerment. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(13), 2381. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16132381 

Boamah, S. A., Read, E. A., & Spence Laschinger, H. K. (2016). Factors influencing new graduate nurse burnout development, job satisfaction, and patient care quality: A time-lagged study. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 73(5), 1182-1195. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.13215 

Liu, C., Liu, S., Yang, S., & Wu, H. (2019). Association between transformational leadership and occupational burnout and the mediating effects of psychological empowerment in this relationship among CDC employees: A cross-sectional study. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 12, 437-446. https://doi.org/10.2147/prbm.s206636 

Wu, X., Hayter, M., Lee, A. J., Yuan, Y., Li, S., Bi, Y., Zhang, L., Cao, C., Gong, W., & Zhang, Y. (2020). A positive spiritual climate supports transformational leadership as means to reduce nursing burnout and intent to leave. Journal of Nursing Management, 28(4), 804-813. https://doi.org/10.1111/jonm.12994 

This paper focuses on staffing and nurse shortage health care stressors. Undeniably, nursing shortage in the United States has become critical, making it difficult for hospital leaders to recruit and retain nurses. Based on the forecasted future nursing demand and supply anticipation, there is likely to be a significant national registered nurses shortage in the near future (Auerbach, Buerhaus & Staiger, 2016). This chronic is attributed to increase in aging population, since older people usually experience more medical issues than younger people. Besides, the introduction of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has increased access to health which has increased health care demand. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to develop organizational policies and practice to curb the staffing and nursing shortage by identifying competing needs, describe policy that influences the staffing and nursing shortage, and propose a policy to balance the competing needs.

Competing Needs in Staffing and Nursing Shortage

The growing population and high demand for nursing professionals is presenting a significant challenge of workforce and expenditure in the health care industry. Currently, the nation is facing a significant growth in its population and drastic increase in baby boomers that are mostly covered by Medicare, leading to a great influence on Medicare demographic changes. As a result, there is a risk for Medicare sustainability due to substantial impact on healthcare spending. Moreover, the increase in nursing shortage has led to pressure in the ability to realize the needs of the baby boomers and the entire growing population (McKechnie, 2016).  Therefore, the nursing shortage that is currently experienced is a reflection of the possible dire challenges for both patients and providers including adverse impacts on the whole healthcare industry in US.

The other competing need is workload and work environment. Essentially, owing to health care cost pressure, health care organizations tend to minimize the staffing and implement paramount overtime policies to compel nurses to work extra times in cases where the number of patients admitted to their respective facilities may increase suddenly. As a result, this increase in workload may influence the decision of a nurse to enter or remain in the profession.

A Relevant Practice in my Organization that Influences Staffing and Nursing Shortage
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My organization developed communication programs to target the staffing and nursing shortage issue. The organization has always played a key role in developing communication collaborations in the area of employee development. Communication is

perceived as a good technique that the managers use to prevail over the effects of nursing shortage. As such, the organization has always maintained an open and clear communication to effectively create a successful relationship between administrators, managers, and nurses to enable building of an outstanding team. Essentially, the communication establishes confidence and increases a sophisticated relationship between organizational leaders and nurses which, in turn, creates a sense of trust, involvement, and belonging (Blais, 2015). In this organization, the issue of communication is stressed from the time of recruitment and hiring. The organization believes that nurse retention begins by hiring the right employee who is capable of working effectively with others and develop good communication skills from the beginning. Therefore, this process is initiated at the time of conducting job interviews with potential nurses. Overall, the rationale of the communication strategy is that when an outstanding level of communication is developed in the organization, employees are likely to portray higher satisfaction.

Moreover, the organization has developed open door policies that enable nurses to voice their concerns and distress to their leaders concerning the issues that they feel are not right. Besides, these policies allow the nurses to give feedback on various issues affecting the organization including the administrative issues. Ideally, the organizational leadership often use the communication technology to connect easily with nurses, which also helps in fostering the trust and engagement between the entire workforce in the organization. Taken together, leaders who forge positive engagement with nursing workforce create durable relationships. While the relationship increases and strengthens, good communication will equally help in establishing trust between leaders and nurses including the entire organizational staff.

Practice Critique for Ethical Consideration

Essentially, this practice of communication strategy is crucial in delivering ethical, high quality nursing care. By encouraging the culture of effective communication, the organizational leadership strengthens the professional commitment of organization to advocating and enhancing nurses and patients’ health and rights (Potter, Perry, Stockert & Hall, 2016). The strength of the communication strategy in promoting ethics is that it helps in evaluating the performance. The routine assessment of organizational communication arrangement, process, and outcomes measures is essential in enhancing the safety of the patients. Nurses are required to report any challenges that affect them, the safety of their patients, and the organization’s integrity. Besides, the effective communication strategy also helps in developing the nursing workforce by helping the employing and training them to embrace and reflect diversity of the patient population. Through communication, appropriate staff are engaged in decision making about the patient care concerns, which ultimately ensures that health care is provided to everyone in need.  Moreover, the communication strategy is also crucial in establishing organization’s commitment by helping in the creation of programs to foster patient safety.  On the other hand, the disadvantage of communication strategy ethical promotion is that it may fail to work where the nurses feel they are poorly remunerated but overburdened by the workload. In turn, they can leave the organization.

Practice Recommendation

The recommended practice is to invest in nursing education as a way of mitigating nursing shortage. The healthcare organization should strive to offer numerous educational opportunities to motivate nurses and to keep them retained. The opportunities include encouraging coaching and mentoring, implementing training programs, recognition and development of soft skills, and helping them to continuously pursue development opportunities. In turn, the employees would develop a feeling of being appreciated and develop a sense of belonging (Wyte-Lake, Tran, Bowman, Needleman & Dobalian, 2013). Country wide, enhancing nursing education can play a momentous role in reducing the shortage and increasing staffing. According to the report by American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), many qualified students are turned away from enrolling for baccalaureate and graduate programs in nursing schools due to shortage of clinical sites, classroom space, preceptors, faculty, and budgetary issues (Rosseter, 2015). Therefore, healthcare industry should establish effective infrastructures to increase the current capacity to provide nursing education to address this challenge of nursing shortage. In short, it is imperative for leaders in the healthcare system to work close with government and nursing schools to help in educating more nurses as a strategy of enhancing nursing staffing and reducing nursing shortage.

Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Conclusion

            Staffing and nursing shortage impacts the manner in which healthcare organizations deliver services. Competing needs including workload amongst the nursing population and the nursing environment impacts the manner in which services are delivered. However, development of effective policies such as communication practices help to address the issue. Even during the development of the practice policies, it becomes fundamental to consider the ethics of the issues at hand. Also, investing in strategies such as nursing education may help reduce the issue.

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Developing Organizational Policies and Practices

            Healthcare organizations focused on delivering high-quality patient care usually have various ongoing activities at any occasion of different project lengths that require different investments of human and financial resources. The activities often conflict, potentially hindering the organization’s success due to competing needs. However, health organizations can balance the competing needs by planning strategically, setting goals, constant communication, and utilizing supportive tools (Gaim et al., 2018). Nursing shortage is the identified national healthcare stressor. The purpose of this paper is to explore the competing needs that impact nursing shortage, discuss practice in the organization that impacts nursing shortage, and recommend a practice change that can balance the competing needs.

Competing Needs Impacting Nursing Shortage

Nursing shortage is measured in connection with a healthcare organization’s staffing levels, available resources, and approximates of health care demand. The gap between the currently available workforce and the target for a higher level of workforce provision is defined as a shortage (Marć et al., 2018). The competing needs affecting the nursing shortage in the organization include patients’ healthcare needs and financial needs for the organization’s projects. There is an increasing need for high-quality healthcare among patients, which creates a high workload for nurses. With the increased aging population characterized by a high prevalence of chronic illnesses, patients need nurses to provide high-quality care (Marć et al., 2018). The patients’ healthcare demands have significantly created the nursing shortage in healthcare organizations. Furthermore, the increasing healthcare needs cause fatigue and burnout among the current workforce resulting in high turnover, which results in further nursing shortage.

The financial needs for an organization’s ongoing projects are another competing need impacting nursing shortage in organizations. Limited financial resources significantly contribute to the nursing shortage since healthcare leaders are required to allocate resources based on priority needs (Marć et al., 2018). Competing needs occur when leaders are forced to choose if to prioritize financial resources to hire more nurses or to use the resources for projects such as infrastructure and purchasing medical commodities. Besides, competing needs arise when leaders have to choose whether to use the limited financial resources as financial incentives for nurses or utilize the resources in other projects (Marć et al., 2018). Choosing the latter option results in inadequate motivation from the organization causing low job satisfaction, high turnover, and eventually nursing shortage.

A Practice in My Organization That May Influence Nursing Shortage

Mandatory overtime is a practice in my organization that may influence nursing shortages. The organization has seen a dramatic increase in leaders using mandatory overtime as a staffing tool. Mandatory overtime is an unsafe staffing practice that is commonly used to address the nursing shortage. Nurses are forced to work extra shifts because of inadequate staffing resulting in high burnout levels and job turnover, further worsening the shortage issue (Son et al., 2019). Besides, mandatory overtime negatively affects patient care since it is attributed to increased cases of medical errors and missed nursing care, resulting in poor patient outcomes and high healthcare costs. Nurses are involved in numerous activities during a single shift, including admitting patients, administering medication, conducting patient assessments, implementing nursing care interventions, and discharges. The duties cause physical and psychological fatigue such as muscle, joint, and back pains, high anxiety levels, depression, and sleep disturbances (Santana et al., 2020). The fatigue and negative health effects of long working hours from mandatory overtime shifts have been associated with a high nursing turnover rate secondary to low job morale. Furthermore, the negative effect on nurses’ health has caused a high rate of sick offs, which further causes a nursing shortage.

Ethical Considerations of the Practice

Mandatory overtime practice aims to meet the nursing staffing needs necessary to meet patient healthcare needs, thus promoting the best health outcomes. Mandatory overtime ensures that adequate nurses attend to patients at every shift, which ensures all interventions are implemented and promotes patient satisfaction. Therefore, the strength of the practice in promoting ethics is seen in ensuring patients receive the needed nursing care to promote better health outcomes (Son et al., 2019). The practice upholds beneficence by ensuring that there are enough nurses to meet patients’ needs at any shift and thus promote the best patient outcomes.

Nevertheless, the mandatory overtime practice is faced with ethical challenges since it puts patients’ and nurses’ health at risk, thus failing to uphold nonmaleficence. Extended shifts have been linked with increased risks for injury, such as musculoskeletal injuries, cardiovascular symptoms, development of high blood pressure, and high-stress levels due to fatigue and inadequate rest (Santana et al., 2020). The practice makes nurses work extended hours without having sufficient sleep, which is detrimental to their mental health. Inadequate rest and sleep and the ensuing fatigue affect a nurse’s ability to provide optimal patient care, thus affecting the quality and safety of patient care. Therefore, the practice puts patients’ safety at risk and increases the risk of hospital-acquired complications from poor or missed nursing care (Son et al., 2019). Furthermore, mandatory overtime violates the nurses’ right to make independent decisions on when to work overtime. Although some nurses do not mind working overtime, mandatory overtime is often an intrusion into nurses’ free time. It takes away their opportunity to engage in social life and have a healthy work-life balance (Santana et al., 2020). Besides, nurses hardly ever assess their fatigue levels correctly until they are at a point of being impaired.

Policy or Practice Changes Designed To Balance the Competing Needs

Task shifting is a practice change tailored to balance the competing needs in relation to the nursing shortage. Task shifting refers to a practice in which trained cadres without competencies for specific tasks implement the tasks, thus increasing levels of health care access (Afolabi et al., 2019). Task shifting seeks to offer cost-effective healthcare services by a new cadre of workers when a nursing shortage puts irrational demands on the existing nurses who cannot meet patients’ health needs. For instance, some trained nurses from other countries may not have the credentials to work as registered nurses in the US due to training differences. Task shifting can be applied by employing these nurses as health care technicians or nurses’ aides. It shifts their roles and responsibilities to diverse practices, especially in areas of long-term care (Leong et al., 2021). Besides, the registered nurses can delegate simple tasks to the nurses, thus reducing the workload.

Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices Conclusion

Nursing shortage is a persistent health issue that affects nurses’ ability to provide high-quality care to patients, thus, compromising the safety of care and patient outcomes. It is not only an organizational challenge but also a healthcare challenge since it adversely affects healthcare outcomes. The competing needs affecting the nursing shortage in the organization are patients’ healthcare needs and financial needs for the organization’s projects. Mandatory overtime shifts have adverse health effects on nurses and patients. Task shifting can be introduced in the organization to lower nurses’ workload, thus reducing the associated nursing shortage.

Assignment: Developing Organizational Policies and Practices References

Afolabi, O., Abboah-Offei, M., Nkhoma, K., & Evans, C. (2019). Task-shifting must recognize the professional role of nurses. The Lancet Global Health, 7(10), e1328-e1329. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(19)30358-4

Gaim, M., Wåhlin, N., e Cunha, M. P., & Clegg, S. (2018). Analyzing competing demands in organizations: a systematic comparison. Journal of Organization Design, 7(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41469-018-0030-9

Leong, S. L., Teoh, S. L., Fun, W. H., & Lee, S. W. H. (2021). Task shifting in primary care to tackle healthcare worker shortages: An umbrella review. European Journal of General Practice, 27(1), 198-210. https://doi.org/10.1080/13814788.2021.1954616

Marć, M., Bartosiewicz, A., Burzyńska, J., Chmiel, Z., & Januszewicz, P. (2018). A nursing shortage – a prospect of global and local policies. International Nursing Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/inr.12473

Santana, I. R., Montes, M. A., Chalkley, M., Jacobs, R., Kowalski, T., & Suter, J. (2020). The impact of extending nurse working hours on staff sickness absence: Evidence from a large mental health hospital in England. International journal of nursing studies, 112, 103611. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2020.103611

Son, Y. J., Lee, E. K., & Ko, Y. (2019). Association of Working Hours and Patient Safety Competencies with Adverse Nurse Outcomes: A Cross-Sectional Study. International journal of environmental research and public health, 16(21), 4083. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16214083

Cost of medication determines whether the patients will be willing to seek healthcare services from an institution or not. The goal of the quadruple Aim is to reduce the cost of education and increase the access to healthcare services by the population. The cost of medication depends on various factors including the changing economic times and the need to increase the number of healthcare providers in an organization. From the business perspective, institutions operate with the aim of making profits. Therefore, in the call for improving the quality of the healthcare services the patients receive, the healthcare institutions may require to increase their staffs and other equipment necessary for efficient operations. Addition of the resources result in the increased cost which must be transferred to the patients who are the consumers. Therefore, the current study explores the conflicting perspective of the mandatory overtime as a way of meeting the needs of the patients without increasing the cost of medication.

Competing Needs

The increasing number of patients in the healthcare institution requires an additional human resource. However, conventionally, the ratio of healthcare providers to the patients have remained low because of the limited resources. Healthcare providers are forced to attend to many patients beyond the standard requirements. Alternatively, the healthcare institution may opt to recruit more staff and this will result in additional costs which may be transferred to what patients pay. Some leaders may opt make full of their current staffing in responding to the rising costs and change in the payment policies by the federal government.

The introduction of the pay-for-value compensation method meant that healthcare institution would improve the quality of healthcare services to the patients (Kominski et al., 2017). Besides, the policy aimed at eliminating all the unnecessary health interventions that could otherwise increase the cost of medication. Furthermore, the hospital institutions are forced to utilize their existing staff accordingly to improve both the quality of care and minimize the treatment costs. Nurses and other healthcare providers may be forced to work for long hours since they have to spend lots of time understanding the need of their patients to meet the quality threshold (Bernstrøm et al., 2019). On the other hand, the increasing number of patients also force them to work overtime. Therefore, the need to lower the cost of medication and at the same time maintain the quality.

Relevant Policy Practice

The healthcare organization introduced the mandatory overtime as a way of dealing with increasing demand for the quality healthcare services as well as maintain the cost low. Eliminating the mandatory overtime means that the institution may have to employ more staff and this will result in additional cost of medication. The nursing staffs are expected to work for about 2 hours extra per day to meet the demand for healthcare delivery. The policy was introduced after recognizing that the nurses and clinicians spent little time with the patients and so did not identify all their needs. As a result, the healthcare providers were required to spend enough time and so they would have to work overtime depending on the patients’ flow. Therefore, all the employees recruited in the organization were made aware of the mandatory overtime requirement whenever requested.

Critique of the Policy

The policy was developed to respond to the need to improve the quality of healthcare services to the patients. The introduction of the pay-for-performance means that the healthcare institutions would be compensated based on the patients outcome and not the services offered. As a result, the institution had to develop an approach of responding to the need without increasing the costs of medication to the patients. Nurses and clinicians would spend more time with their patients and understand all understand the underlying factors that could impact their treatment outcomes and this would lead to better outcomes.

However, exposing the healthcare providers to long-working hours could leads to injuries and emotional exhaustion. Studies have indicated that burnout among the employees in healthcare sector is attributed to the long working hours (Kowalczuk et al., 2020). It is ethically wrong to expose the healthcare providers to health risks with the intention of reducing the medication costs (Moon et al., 2020). The quadruple Aim advocate for both the better outcomes for the patients and improved quality of life for the healthcare providers. Mandatory overtime for the healthcare providers does not improve their quality of life but instead increases their risk of developing burnout.

Furthermore, studies show that fatigued employees are prone of making errors and this means that the patients could suffer more from the medication errors (Salen & Norman, 2018). The policy in the institution is only suitable for short-t